Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @06:30PM
from the does-this-filesystem-make-me-look-fat dept.

number6x writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that the Open Invention Network has posted the details of three of the eight patents used by Microsoft in the Tom Tom suit (which Tom Tom settled last month), asking the community for prior art. These patents cover aspects of the FAT file system. You can find them on Post-Issue.org — see numbers 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt believes that these three patents are of tenuous validity and will probably not survive a review. Bergelt believes that there's a good chance that the USPTO may well invalidate them before the end of the year.

If a few lay-men webanaughts can find prior art in patents that were enough to force a company to settle out of court (for fear of legislation), then clearly the system is so completely broken that I fear it cannot be repaired.

Here is my question: Why should I spend the money that I get from my 9-5 job to start up a new company if a few lazy lawyers can bring me to court and sue me without having any real legal ground? I might as well not bring innovation to the stage and save myself the hassle.

If a few lay-men webanaughts can find prior art in patents that were enough to force a company to settle out of court (for fear of legislation), then clearly the system is so completely broken that I fear it cannot be repaired.

Well, one person saying that there's a good chance that the USPTO may invalidate a patent (or three) is not the same as actually getting the USPTO to invalidate said patent(s). It might happen, or the patents may prove to be claimed too narrowly to be invalidated easily. How broad doe

It might happen, or the patents may prove to be claimed too narrowly to be invalidated easily. How broad does a patent covering VFAT have to make it difficult for competitors to interact with VFAT and still be a novel, non-obvious solution?

It doesn't matter. The reviews for prior art and the determination of patent infringement are separate. What seems to happen is that the patent is read narrowly when looking for a conflict with prior art, and broadly when looking for infringement. So the patent office and courts can simultaneously hold that a piece of prior art does not invalidate the patent, and that a particular device that uses something substantially similar to that same prior art is infringing.

That's exactly the system that big companies and monopolies want and why it is how it is - one in which is completely determined by the size of your army of lawyers which favours monopolies and large companies. Corruption/money/competition got them there, now they use their money to keep themselves there.

Tom Tom did indeed blink first - they had been discussing licensing with Microsoft of several Tom Tom patents which they felt Microsoft had been infringing upon, and had threatened MS with litigation. When the licensing deal fell through, Microsoft simply pulled the gun first.

So why is no one trying very hard to invalidate Tom Toms patents in this case? From the sound of it they seem rather trivial -

Yeah well, until software patents are abolished, you're in for the same shit. Both the US democratic and republican parties, as well as most political parties world wide are *owned* by big business. These bastards aren't in the best interest of the public, they're in the best interest of filling their own pockets with bribes and kickbacks from big, self interested businesses. Just because we don't see it, doesn't mean it isn't happening. Oh, and Obama isn't any better, he's just as bad as the rest of th

I'm curious why TomTom wouldn't have done this work themselves to invalidate Microsoft's claims and avoid any sort of settlement? Couldn't they have stalled this until a determination was made that either the patent was invalid, or that their methods were based on the prior art - just like Microsoft's?

I'm hoping that TomTom just didnt do their homework and someone manages to come up with the info that they did not.

Makes me wonder how much luck this initiative will have - though I am hoping lots.

On another note, I wonder if an effort to invalidate the patents on the basis of "gee, that's obvious" is taking place as well...

Perhaps because Tom Tom's business model involves building and selling GPS devices, and not fighting patent battles?

It becomes really easy to decide to settle such a lawsuit to keep management focused on "job 1", rather than focusing on saving a few pennies per unit by fighting a lawsuit for several years with a very well funded adversary.

The difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business often comes down to the CEO's ability to make such a business decision without letting the "fairness" of the issue cloud the "business" of the issue. Get too involved in "I'm not going to let them bleed me for what may be an obvious patent with what could be some obliquely-related prior art", and you're not focusing on your core business.

Very good point... though I guess that would depend on what concessions they had to make in the settlement. Wonder if we will ever know. And of course, there is the possibility that they are fighting the patent separately in the hopes of invalidating any concessions they were forced to make.

It becomes really easy to decide to settle such a lawsuit to keep management focused on "job 1", rather than focusing on saving a few pennies per unit by fighting a lawsuit for several years with a very well funded adversary.

Because it invites other to sue you too. IBM could have easily bought SCOX to make their little... 'problem' go away, but it did not. Instead it spent millions to BURY SCOX to let all other know that it will not be intimidated into buying out a plaintiff.

I suspect that IBM's motivation was much more related to ensuring that their customers didn't get cold feet about linux than it was to avoid other people trying to sue them. SCO was threatening all linux users- and since IBM makes money off linux at this point, they, that meant SCO was threatening their entire customer base. That made it a very good idea for IBM to trounce SCO in court, proving that their customers were safe (and therefore should keep buying IBM products/services).

The GP is talking about a very different view. MS was never going to sue TomTom's users; they just wanted money from TomTom. It's not at all unlikely that the settlement cost less money than litigation would, and certainly is less distracting, so the GP's point is quite valid.

Because it invites other to sue you too. IBM could have easily bought SCOX to make their little... 'problem' go away, but it did not. Instead it spent millions to BURY SCOX to let all other know that it will not be intimidated into buying out a plaintiff.

IBM didn't make the first move to sue, SCO did. In many ways I feel IBMs lawyers felt fighting SCO was better than letting the arrogant little bastards get their way. SCO's case was so full of holes that everyone wanted them to suffer. SCO was also going af

While your post is true - and a method I am sure any legitimate company would want to go, the big difference is IBM can afford to spend millions on a lawsuit (and not bat an eye).

There lies a problem in our legal system. Often in cases like these, the company (or individual) with the least money (to spend on represenation) loses or gets forced to settle under unfavorable terms.

Microsoft has sued (in combination with other related activities) other companies out of existence in the past (Stac Electronics f

Perhaps because Tom Tom's business model involves building and selling GPS devices, and not fighting patent battles?

I suppose TomTom's suits against Garmin and Toyota were filed because it gets too cold in the Netherlands and they wanted to spend some time in the Eastern District of Texas (their venue of choice when they sue others)?

"Perhaps because Tom Tom's business model involves building and selling GPS devices, and not fighting patent battles?"
You might be right. And Microsoft's business model involves aggressively suing, acquiring and otherwise eliminating potential competition. They also make a half-assed effort to produce things. Guess who wins in the end.

Now while this may be funny, it actually could work in MS's favour. For example, if they can make a big enough deal about this they can perhaps persuade other, smaller vendors to pay the patent extortion money and when the patent is invalidated it really doesn't matter because MS already has the money.

Why the hell weren't they using ext2/3 or anything else? I'm guessing compatibility for the flash card readers for music loaded up by a windows PC or something?

Long AND short file names - This is the ~1 ~2 etc crap you get for file names from the 8.3 format. Probably not the exact same thing but wouldn't Unix symbolic links count? They're old as dirt.http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5579517 [google.com]

I would have said the same thing. However, I have not bothered to decipher the patents in question, so I could be wrong. Having said that, it should be said that the first versions of MSDOS were effectively clones of CP/M. So much so that it was easy to get CP/M programs running on IBM PC's equiped with v20 processors. (Took myself and another 24 hours to write appropriate code to trap the vector and redirect through the 8086 MSDOS kernel.)

These are patents on the VFAT/FAT32 long-file-name kludge. They have been fought by PubPat and found invalid, but the patents were restored upon appeal. Read about it [wikipedia.org] and you'll know why I stick with 8.3 file names on the embedded systems I work with. When lawyers are involved, being in the right is the road to bankruptcy!

There's no obvous links to the patents themselves but from their names I'd say they are about VFAT not FAT itself. VFAT is the kludge that allows long file names on FAT filesystems.If FAT alone was the issue then it would be its own prior art because it was first used in the early '80s, its specifications were widely known well before 1990 and any patents would have expired by now.These patents date from 1992 to 1995 so only have a few years to run, but long enough to incentivize a switch away from (V)FAT I

1. Putting files on a disk2. The FAT file system3. Using "long" filenames to name files.

What the patents cover is a scheme by which long filenames are emulated on a FAT disk, which normally can only handle 8.3 filenames.

In addition the patents cover a bit of actual innovation. The obvious method of doing this is to make a hidden file containing the long filenames. Microsoft instead made hidden directory entries (a whole lot of them) containing the long fi

Not to belittle your comment but instead software patents in general, yeah, it's called a program, you can make a program do anything you want because it's just an idea. Just because someone made a jerry-rig program to function with other programs which existed at the time doesn't mean it was some amazing "innovation". Anyone can make a program given enough time, the only difference between programs are their feature list, speed, bug numbers, interoperability with other programs, etc, but they've been the

I agree that the Microsoft patent is bogus. Just wanted to state that things are not as black & white as people make it out to be.

I think a better attack is that you cannot interoperate without violating this patent. If this was a technique by which Microsoft could read/write FAT *faster* than anybody else, then maybe the patent could stand. But in fact you cannot write FAT *at all* without violating this patent, and you must be able to write FAT to use a device that can also be stuck into a Windows mac

Good points, or simply that standards are needed for competition, and that the patent system is out of control. I like to simply say that all of that bureaucracy is BS and not needed at all. Save the tax payers money, get rid of all patents and copyrights too at that, and let companies truly, directly, *actually* compete with each other. Let the best things come out naturally due to companies wanting to make sales, instead of letting monopolies strangle everyone, preventing improvements from reaching and